A storage and/or transport container for fluent material is known which comprises an erect and annular side wall and a flat and horizontal bottom wall joined together at the outer edge of the bottom wall and lower edge of the side wall to form an upwardly open vessel, and a flexible bag or bladder within this vessel that lies against its inner surface and that itself contains the material being transported or stored. The side and bottom walls are typically made of round-section metal bars or rods that are spot-welded together in a criss-crossed gridwork with the bars welded at the intersections. It is also possible to use profiled bars and is in fact standard to provide a profiled rim element around the upper edge of the side wall. Frequently extra bars are integrated into the bottom or side wall for increased localized stiffness.
It is standard also to bend the rods forming the bottom wall to form pallet-like feet or to weld specially bent rods to the floor to form such feet. This makes it particularly easy to handle these containers, which often contain a cubic meter, by means of a fork-lift truck or by means of a crane. It has even been suggested to add wooden blocks to the bottom wall to make such pallet feet. Such blocks are stapled to the rods or plates welded to the rods are screwed to the blocks.
Such arrangements typically fail at the connection between the gridwork vessel and the pallet feet. The inherently rough treatment of moving the container around creates considerable stress where these feet join the vessel. In addition vibration during rail or truck transport is particularly effective to damage the connection between each pallet foot and the gridwork vessel, so that the containers usually fail first at this location, in particular at the connection between the middle foot and the side wall.